


Mamma Deathclaw

by Folqueraine



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Anxiety, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Motherhood, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-12-07 20:06:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18239612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Folqueraine/pseuds/Folqueraine
Summary: Sole hasn't been herself recently, Piper and Hancock can tell. Something makes her sad, and the incident at the Museum of Witchcraft seems to have brought her closer to the edge. Sole's two closest friends try to help.





	Mamma Deathclaw

"Can you leave me alone, please?" Soledad almost snaps at Hancock.

Sole is almost never rude -- it's ridiculous, she's always, if not friendly, at least courteous, even with fricking raiders. The only creatures she's ever sworn at are ferals and deathclaws, like the one that was waiting for them inside the Museum of Witchcraft, a piece of which is now cooking over the fire.

Point being, there's something wrong with Sole -- Piper and Hancock can see it, but they don't know what to do about it. Piper stands in a corner, out of Blue's view.

"As you wish, sister." Hancock stands up, wipes his hands on his pants. "I'll get the sleeping bags ready," he says as he grabs their bags and makes his way towards Piper.

Blue's fist clenches and unclenches.

"I'm not..." she stammers over her shoulder. "I'm not angry at you, okay? I just need... I just need to be left alone a little."

"It's okay," he replies with a patience Piper didn't know he had. "You take your time. I'll be in the next room."

As he steps closer, Piper wishes it wasn't so dark in there, so she could see his face better. Blue swears his eyes are very expressive, but the journalist is still a little bit freaked out by the ghoul. Still, she picks up her own gear and follow him into the next room, pulling out a candle and lighting it up.

"What on earth is wrong with her?" she whispers once they're out of earshot.

"You ask me? If I knew I'd be doing something about it." He unrolls his and Blue's sleeping bags. "It's about the egg, isn't it?" he adds after a moment.

Yeah, it's about the egg, that much Piper gathered, although it doesn't make sense. Ever since her first encounter with mirelurks -- come to mind, Blue had sworn a lot that day, too -- Soledad had taken to snipe the hell out of egg clutches as soon as she caught sight of them. Piper had expected her to do the same with the last intact deathclaw egg left in the Museum.

When she had craddled it delicately to her chest, and later rolled her jacket into a sort of makeshift nest for it, near the fire -- and mamma deathclaw's body -- they'd been taken aback, to put it mildly. Piper had been the first to suggest destroying the thing, and so the first to be barked at this evening. Ever since, Blue had been, there was no other word for it, _guarding_ the egg.

Like a mother deathclaw.

Hancock is smoking, sitting on his sleeping bag, leaning against the wall. Their eyes meet. She sits down crosslegged next to him.

"Have you ever wondered, about Blue, if..."

She doesn't know how to word it. She has no _proof_ , just...

"If what, sister?"

"Nah, I'm probably imagining things. Just... stuff."

"Because I've been imagining things, too. I mean, I'm not the most perceptive of ghouls, but there's stuff Sole hasn't been telling us. But, ladies first. What's it you're imagining?"

Piper glances towards the door, then to Hancock. Blue isn't likely to interrupt. And even so, she never made her swear to secrecy, so she shouldn't feel bad about sharing. The two of them are an item, after all.

"This is how it goes," Piper starts. "The first time I've seen blue in a mood like this, was Christmas."

  


**A few months before**

Christmas was always a good time in Diamond City. It had to be made so. The weather turned cold enough that sometimes water would freeze overnight inside cupboards, for the metal shacks offered very little in the way of insulation. The trading caravans were fewer and further between, and brought less fresh food. The sun was rare and the days short.

So the inhabitants of Diamond City worked hard to make that darkest, coldest month of the year lighter and warmer. Piper could find a lot of things to criticize about the green jewel, but Christmas had been the nicest discovery she'd made, that first year. She'd first regretted that she hadn't known it as a kid, and then rejoiced that Nat would grow up to celebrate Christmas every year.

It was even nicer now that Blue was part of the family. It seemed a bit crazy to have become so close in such a short time - it had been only a few weeks since Piper had ruthlessly used the blue-clad, lost stranger to find her way back inside the city. But there had been something about Soledad, Piper couldn't put her finger on it, that had made her trust her on sight.

Getting to know her in the following days had only convinced her that she was right. How Sole had found the force to join with and recreate the Minutemen while still looking for her husband's killers, in a world that wasn't even hers, still amazed her to this day. And Blue (the nickname had stuck) just never stopped helping. There seemed to be no end to her goodwill, and yet she never let anyone step on her toes. She showed no pity for thieves and killers, and couldn't _not_ do something when faced with an act of injustice.

Truth be told, Piper had the biggest crush since Magnolia.

She realized that Blue had only recently lost her husband and so she wouldn't act on that crush unless there was the slightest indication that it was reciprocated. But she could still be Blue's best friend, and as such the shack she shared with Nat now welcomed Blue more often than not.

Blue who was, pardon the terrible pun, obviously feeling blue. The closer Christmas was, the less she left the shack. She didn't mention Nate or her mission to find him any way. She didn't even go to see Nick. She did her share of the domestic chores, and when Piper asked, she would tell her about her actions with the Minutemen, letting Piper turn them into elaborate articles that she may or may not publish later. But she would never offer those stories as she used to, or tell her about before the war.

After lunch, when Nat was at school and Piper busy typesetting and printing, Blue would rummage through her trunk and fiddle with junk.

The incident that particularly struck Piper happened three days before Christmas. She came back from her office and immediately noticed the smell of fresh paint. Blue was lying on her stomach, giving a Giddy-Up Buttercup a new layer of yellow paint. Her tongue was sticking out like that of a hardworking schoolgirl. Around her, several repainted green alien toys were drying.

"Well, looks like someone is ready to open a toy shop!"

Blue had frozen. A look of undescribable sadness had crossed her face before she'd said, with the flimsiest excuse of a smile:

"Well, it's Christmas. That's what Christmas is about, offering presents to children, isn't it? I figure, well, even though I haven't got a family, I can still do my part, right?"

Piper had made her way to Blue, careful not to knock over any of the toys.

"Are you okay, Blue? You've been a bit... off, these last few days."

Blue had picked herself up and sat on the floor, not looking at Piper, staring through the planks. It was the first time that Piper had really felt worried about her. She'd knelt to be at her level, and Blue had crossed her arms on her knees and burrowed her head between them.

"I've got to be," she'd mumbled. "I've got to be. I can't think about it. I can't."

Piper guessed, from her heaving shoulders, that she was crying, but she'd never know for sure. She sat next to her and held her for fifteen minutes, and Blue never looked up. She only hiccuped that she couldn't think about it, and she couldn't talk about, or she just couldn't _do_ it.

When Nat came back from school, Blue had composed herself.

  


The night before Christmas, when Nat was fast asleep and Piper a little bit tipsy, Blue borrowed her coat and left the house with a sack full of toys.

  


On Christmas morning, Nat came back from seeing her friends with a smirk and announced that the kids from the poorest families, those who slept without a roof over their heads, had awoken to find that someone had left toys near their beds. At Blue's suggestion that it was Santa, she'd rolled her eyes to indicate that she was way too old to fall for that.

Thirty seconds later, Nat had squealed in delight and crushed Blue in a hug when she found the fully working, bright yellow, pre-war typewriter and the set of snow-white paper sheets that awaited her at the breakfast table.

Everyone had seemed so happy, and Piper had been distracted by the fact that her friend managed to sneak in and fix a typewriter under her nose. She momentarily forgot Blue's sudden melancholy.

  


On the second of January, 2288, Nick Valentine, with the help of a dog, found a clue about the location of Blue's husband's killers, and Blue left in a rush.

When she opened Blue's trunk to store the things she'd left behind, Piper found a clean teddy bear, an alien toy and a baby rattle, neatly stacked on top of Blue's other possessions.

  


**At the Museum**

"So what I'm saying is, it's not the first time I've seen Blue get depressed around the notion of... family, or children, I guess."

Piper hands the third cigarette they shared back to Hancock. He takes his time drawing on it, and exhales a puff of smoke through what used to be his nose.

Piper adds, "I thought, perhaps she was just depressed that she lost her husband and never got a chance to have a family of her own."

Hancock shakes his head and crushed the butt of the cigarette on the floor.

"Did Sole ever tell you about the kid in the fridge?"

Piper sifts through her memories ; whenever Blue ventures out on a mission without her, she tells her everything when she gets back. Kid in a fridge? That sounds like a terrible tabloid title, and she's certain she's never heard of it. Hancock realizes it, and pursues:

"We were at Jamaica Plains, helping the settlers organizing their stuff. Well, she was giving orders and drawing diagrams, and I was making jet with her chemistry set. Guard tells us about a red flare going off nearby, like the Minutemen use, so we run and help them fight off a bunch of supermutants, which wakes up a bunch of mirelurks, since there's a pond nearby, long story, anyway, we win, everybody starts butchering the hounds and the murks for meat and Sole thinks she sees a power armor frame in the pond, she takes it on a walk to see if it still works, and at some point we start hearing a voice -- I'm kinda used to hearing voices, especially when I've been brewing my own shit, so I don't really pay attention until Sole hears it too. It's coming from that old fridge sticking out of the mud. The door's stuck, so I shoot if off, and inside there's a kid. A ghoul kid. Says he's named Billy."

Hancock rumages through his pockets for a last pack of cigs, but fails to procure one.

"So that's how ghouls reproduce, heh?" Piper smirks. "Spontaneous generation in fridges?"

"You're not gonna laugh long. Kid got stuck there when the bombs fell."

Piper's face crumbles. "Oh no. Don't tell me he spent 200 years in there?"

"He did," Hancock says with a grave nod. He's not looking at her, he's back there. "200 years locked in a fridge. I expected him to be insane, you know? 200 years screaming for help. No one to talk to. No light. No idea what happened out there..."

"He wasn't?"

"'s far as I can tell, no. Just wanted to go check on his parents. You should have seen Sole's face. She knew the poor fuckers were dead, but there's that kid begging to be taken home, and she can't tell him no. She can't get herself to tell him that, and neither can I, so we agree. It's a short walk, but the kid has no idea what to expect out there. Doesn't know about molerats, bloatflies or deathclaws. On the way some fuckers want to buy the kid - I think they were with the Gunners. And there's only one reason for those sick fucks to buy a ghoul kid, and that's to satisfy some rich asshole's fetish. But I'm rambling again. We kick the gunners' asses and we get to the kid's house. Only house left standing around. And who's waiting inside? The goddamn parents."

"No way!"

"I shit you not, sister. Mom and dad got bombed and ghoulified. They made up some theory about genetic predisposition to ghoulification. Might be something worth looking into, actually, but that's another story. So we leave Billy with his parents. Got 250 caps for our good deed. Sole suggested they came to Jamaica Plain, but they just wanted to enjoy each other's company for a while, I guess. So the sun's about to set and we're trying to make our way back to Jamaica Plain before it gets too risky. And I notice she's kinda sad. And without me asking, she tells me how she feels bad because she'd already accepted that the parents were dead and she was gonna take the kid in. Foster him in one of the Minutemen settlements, or even bring him to Goodneighbour. And she felt guilty because she wasn't 100% happy to give him back to his parents."

  


Hancock leans his head back against the wall, crunching his hat in the process. His eyes crinkle with the smile he can't hold back.

"You know, Wright, I think I'd been in love with her for a while at this point, but that's the moment I realized what I was actually feeling. I knew she wasn't a bigot when it came to us ghouls, she'd never treated one of us any different because of our looks, but adopting one? That's something else. That's another kind of commitment. But she didn't care. She saw a child that needed a family and she was ready to be it. For all of her life. Yep, I think that's the moment I realized I had a chance with her."

Piper can't help but smile too, because let's be honest, she's always been a sucker for mushy love stories. Then Hancock's smile drops, and so does hers.

"Then something like today happens, and I realize I'm not enough. She's missing something, and she won't tell me what it is. I can see it's eating her from the inside and I don't know what to do."

Piper sighs.

"It's insane, that effect she has on people. It's like she's the most precious thing in the world and I want to do everything to make her happy. I feel you, Hancock."

He chuckles.

"So, you're the investigative journalist. What's your theory?"

Piper weighs her words carefully before she lets them go.

"I think Blue had a child before the war and they died, or she doesn't know what happened to them when the bombs dropped, and she hasn't got over it yet. She didn't get the closure she needed."

"Yeah." Hancock nods with a thoughtful look. "I figure out that much too."

"You're in a better position to tell, though," Piper adds. "Pregnancy leaves... marks, on a woman's body. It never gets back to how it was before--"

"Gross! Man, why would you-- never mind. Not that-- " Hancock takes a second to collect himself. "We haven't gone that far in bed, if you must know, though why you think I can tell the difference between the pussies of women who've had kids and those who haven't--"

Piper pulls a face.

"Dude, I meant her belly, not her..." She snorts. "The look on your face, Hancock! I meant her _belly_. Pregnancy leaves stretchmarks." He doesn't seem to know, so she explains further: "Like, you know how women have those pale, opalescent marks on their breasts and thighs? That happens during puberty, because the body grows too fast for the skin to catch up. Same thing during pregnancy, it leaves stretchmarks on the belly. My mom had them, any way. She said every woman did."

"Sole has them. Boobs, thighs, stomach, just like you said."

Silence takes over the small room, on the walls of which the candles cast flickering shadows.

It's Hancock who breaks it. "So what do we do, now?"

_We_ , Piper thinks.

"I know the _reasonable_ option is to talk to her," Hancock says with a derogative stress on _reasonable_ , "but I can't stand the notion of making her sadder by... by forcing her to _think_ about it."

"She's always thinking about about it, Hancock."

He takes a deep breath and is about to say something when Sole knocks on the door - two short raps, as always.

"Let me put my pants on!" Hancock yells.

"Hancock!" Piper screams in outrage. She scrambles to open the door while he takes his time to stand up, and what the fuck is he thinking saying that kind of crap when Blue's already insecure, but when the door does open, their friend is leaning against the wall with an exasperated but endeared look.

"As if she would stoop so low," Blue rolls her eyes at him.

"Aww, you hurt my feelings, doll," Hancock says with the fakest contrite expression as he leaves the room.

"We weren't..." Piper stammers. "I mean, of course we weren't. You know that."

"Of course you weren't, Pipe. Chill out. That's Hancock's humor for you. Dinner's ready. Grab the candles, will you?"

Soledad is more composed during dinner. The deathclaw steaks are fucking delicious - there's something to say for pre-war cooking, even though the ingredients have changed, Sole's skills make a big difference.

As he sucks the juice off his fingers, Hancock is torn about what he's supposed to do. Sole seems happy again, humming as she wraps the leftover meat, and he doesn't want to bring the sorrow back. But he doesn't have to -- he sees her gaze wander to the egg again. The companionable post-dinner silence turns heavier.

"I think we should take the egg to Diamond City," she declares.

Hancock can't hide his surprise. "Really?"

"I'm not gonna lie, I've thought about bringing it back to its nest. But it's not reasonable. I don't wanna put you guys at risk on a whim. And bring another deathclaw into this world. We don't even know if there's a daddy deathclaw there to care for it. Or an aunt, or... whatever. Plus, it's just insane. I mean, it's a deathclaw. Why did I even need to think twice about it?"

She's getting agitated again and he catches one of her hands mid-flight.

"Listen, doll, no one's gonna blame you for wanting to reunite a kid with their family. You're always striving to do the right thing, sometimes you just get a little too... dedicated. But you saw the light in the end, didn't ya?"

The soul-searching look they share makes Piper feel out of place. They stammer their next words at the same time:

"We need to talk about something--"

"There's something I ought to tell you--"

Piper's scoop-sense is tingling. This is the moment of truth.

"We're listening to you," Hancock says.

Sole stands up and start pacing the room, like she does when strategizing before a battle.

"You two are my closest friends since I came out of the Vault. It's been hard dealing with... all of it. I've tried to keep myself busy. I needed a goal, something to do, or else I would be thinking about Nate, and so I focused on Kellog, and when that didn't work on the Minutemen, the Railroad... But sometimes this isn't enough and I get overwhelmed. You've both seen me at my worst and you've been nothing but... helpful, and supporting, and you've never asked about it. I cry and I shout at you and I treat you like shit and you... you're still by my side."

"Blue, we don't need to ask -- what you've gone through, the bombing, watching your husband's murder, and then stepping into this shitty world alone, knowing all the people you've known and loved are dead -- this would drive anyone crazy. To be honest, I'm impressed at how well you're holding up."

"Not all of them," Sole mutters, facing away from them.

Hancock strokes her leg from where he's sitting. "Doll?"

She turns around. She's biting at a nail, and then decides to sit down between them again.

"They're not all dead. The reason Kellog killed Nate is because he didn't want to give them Shaun. I don't know why they wanted him in the first place but-- they took Shaun. So he had to have some sort of value to them. They came all the way into the Vault for my baby, and they took him. He has to be alive." She looks up, meeting Hancock’s gaze. “The Institute took my son, Hancock. He’s somewhere out there, and I’m worried to death, but I’m going to get him back.” She squeezes a hand he hadn’t noticed he was holding. “I’m going to get him back if it kills me.”


End file.
